ABSTRACT:
There are many factors that contribute to the condition of oil and the equipment it lubricates. When properly maintained, oil will last longer, requiring less oil changes and far less equipment break downs.

A scheduled maintenance program geared towards preventative, predictive or best yet, proactive maintenance, will bring a great financial savings to any industrial plant. Reactive maintenance costs companies millions of dollars every year in break downs and production down time that could have been prevented with regular oil analysis and condition monitoring.
Why not prolong the life of equipment components while creating increasing efficiency?
Analyzing lubricating oil will find developing faults in the early stages, avoiding expensive critical failures and prevent downtime and lost production Pull oil samples on a routine schedule from the same location to ensure accurate data on the equipment.. Take action to correct or repair a problem before it is critical or there is a failure. This is a huge saving on maintenance repair and replacement costs. These are all important steps to gaining the full benefits of a good lubrication program. Taking these steps will reduce energy consumption, lubricant costs, repair, replacement costs, and increase the life of the equipment.

Premature wear can be caught and corrected in the early stages using an ICP spectrometer to measure the concentration of wear metals, contaminants and additives in a lubricant. This test reports 20 elements in parts per million. Spectroscopy will show levels of wear metals such as Iron (Fe), Copper (Cu), Lead (Pb) and Tin (Sn).

How great of an oil lubrication savings and benefits will be achieved through oil analysis?

Change the oil less often by monitoring the oil condition through oil analysis. Manufacturers’ will recommend varied drain intervals, for proper maintenance of the piece of equipment. Suggested oil drain intervals recommended by manufacturers can be any were from 250 hours to 2,000 hours depending on the piece of equipment. Depending on how the equipment is being used; the cleanliness and other conditions of the environment the equipment is being used in, the need to change the oil lubricant will vary.

Monitoring and testing the lubricants on a regular basic will allow the oil to be changed only when necessary. This saves downtime, new oil cost, and cost of oil removal. This also saves our already depleting natural oil resource. Know the actual condition of the oil and when it needs to be changed instead of changing the oil on a hours used basic. Filtering the oil, correct vents on equipment, proper oil storage and oil containers that keep out contaminants will give better performance; giving additional life of the oil.

Manpower is a large part of the manufacturing cost for all industries. Equipment rarely brakes down at a convenient time. What does it cost in manpower while the equipment is down and the staff cannot work through their shift? The financial loss do to lost production time and not meeting deadlines are more reasons to move to better preventative or proactive maintenance program. The overtime or cost to hire someone to repair or replace equipment is usually not in the already lean maintenance budget. This is where a proactive maintenance program will enable you to be informed of the equipment conditions, to more efficiently use the limited manpower. Not to mention the expensive call out cost that can be saved.

There will be a great savings in investment due to these higher utilization ratios. The greater machine efficiency and increased life of all regularly maintained equipment will extend the life of equipment while saving energy cost. Identify the faults on broken equipment prior to a shutdown. This will increase the maintenance staff’s efficiency and cut repair time. Manpower can be redirected to production to increase profits instead of reactive maintenance and repairs.